Andrew Pepper - Böcker

What gives crime fiction its distinctive shape and form? What makes it such a compelling vehicle of social and political critique? Unwilling Executioner argues that the answer lies in the emerging genre's complex and intimate relationship with the bureaucratic state and modern capitalism, and the contradictions that ensue once the state assumes control of the criminal justice system. This study offers a dramatic new interpretation of the genre's emergence and evolution over a three hundred year period and as a genuinely transnational phenomenon. From its roots in the tales of criminality circulated widely in Paris and London in the early eighteenth century, this book examines the extraordinary richness, diversity and complexity of the genre's subsequent thematizations of crime and policing--moving from France and Britain and from continental Europe and the United States to other parts of the globe. In doing so it offers new ways of reading established crime novelists like Gaboriau, Doyle, Hammett, and Simenon, beyond their national contexts and an impulse to characterize their work as either straightforwardly 'radical' or 'conservative'. It also argues for the centrality of writers like Defoe, Gay, Godwin, Vidocq, Morrison, and more recently Manchette, Himes, and Sjöwall and Wahlöö to a project where crime and policing are rooted, and shown to be rooted, in the social and economic conditions of their time. These are all deeply political writers even if their novels exhibit no interest in directly promoting political causes or parties. The result is an agile, layered, and far-reaching account of the crime story's ambivalent relationship to the justice system and its move to complicate our understanding of what crime is and how society is policed and for whose benefit.

What gives crime fiction its distinctive shape and form? What makes it such a compelling vehicle of social and political critique? Unwilling Executioner argues that the answer lies in the emerging genre's complex and intimate relationship with the bureaucratic state and modern capitalism, and the contradictions that ensue once the state assumes control of the criminal justice system. This study offers a dramatic new interpretation of the genre's emergence and evolution over a three hundred year period and as a genuinely transnational phenomenon. From its roots in the tales of criminality circulated widely in Paris and London in the early eighteenth century, this book examines the extraordinary richness, diversity, and complexity of the genre's subsequent thematizations of crime and policing—moving from France and Britain and from continental Europe and the United States to other parts of the globe. In doing so it offers new ways of reading established crime novelists like Gaboriau, Doyle, Hammett, and Simenon, beyond their national contexts and an impulse to characterize their work as either straightforwardly 'radical' or 'conservative'. It also argues for the centrality of writers like Defoe, Gay, Godwin, Vidocq, Morrison, and more recently Manchette, Himes, and Sjöwall and Wahlöö to a project where crime and policing are rooted, and shown to be rooted, in the social and economic conditions of their time. These are all deeply political writers even if their novels exhibit no interest in directly promoting political causes or parties. The result is an agile, layered, and far-reaching account of the crime story's ambivalent relationship to the justice system and its move to complicate our understanding of what crime is and how society is policed and for whose benefit.

Reservoir Management is the indispensable guide to managing all aspects of small to large reservoirs and dams. Reservoir managers now require a wealth of technical, environmental and legal knowledge alongside a background to key aspects of design, as well as safety know-how, in order to successfully manage their assets. There is also a need for reservoir managers to understand not just the technical fundamentals of reservoirs but to understand the impact they can have on the local environment. In this book, Andrew Pepper, with contributions from reservoir experts, covers all of the essential expertise and technical knowledge in one easy-to-read volume written with the practitioner in mind.The book includes coverage of:the various functions which reservoirs performroles and responsibilities of all involved in reservoir managementhydrological and water quality aspects of reservoirsphysical components and features of dams and reservoirsmaintaining mechanical and electrical equipmentecology, amenity and recreation purposes of reservoirsreservoir safetyincidents and emergenciessediment troubleshootingreservoir decommissioning.This book will be an essential purchase for any reservoir manager, as well as for developers and designers looking to exercise good practice for the future management of new reservoirs.

Smart Dams and Reservoirs contains the proceedings of the 20th Biennial Conference of the British Dam Society that took place from 13-15th September 2018.Many new techniques and methods are now available for investigating, designing, constructing and monitoring dams. The papers in this book give examples of how new ideas have been used in practice to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of all aspects of the work that is necessary to ensure the safety of dams and reservoirs. The heritage value of older dams is being increasingly recognised, and this book aims to show how ensuring their safety can be carried out without adversely affecting the historic and landscape features of these sites.The papers are grouped into six chapters covering:planning and investigatory techniquesworking with our heritagenew approaches to designinnovative approaches in during dam constructionsensing and monitoring techniques for the twenty-first centuryemergency preparedness.The papers in this book will be of interest not only to engineers and others directly involved in the management of reservoirs, but also to designers and suppliers of new techniques and remote monitoring and surveillance equipment.

Hollywood has a growing fascination with America’s past. This is evidenced in the release of a rash of films of this genre in the past 25 years. This book offers an analysis of how and why contemporary Hollywood films have sought to mediate American history. It is the first book to explore, comprehensively, the post-Cold War period of film-making, and to consider whether or how far contemporary films have begun to unravel the unifying myths of earlier films and periods. It also considers why such films are becoming increasingly integral to the ambitions of a globally-focused American film industry.The relationship between film and history - the way in which film mediates history and vice versa - is a complex one. In this book, the authors work from two main assumptions. First, that films revision events to challenge or, perhaps more typically, to reaffirm traditional historical interpretations. Second, that this process can only be understood in the context of contemporary debates about identity politics, America’s role in world affairs, and the globalisation of the American film business. The book is structured by historical periods and includes chapters on:• The American Revolution (Revolution, The Patriot) • Slavery (Roots, Amistad)• The Civil War (Gettysburg,Glory,Ride with the Devil, Cold Mountain)• World War II (Saving Private Ryan, Thin Red Line, Pearl Harbor) • Oliver Stone and the Decade of Trauma (Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, Heaven and Earth, Nixon)• Civil Rights and Black Nationalism (Panther, Mississippi Burning, The Hurricane, Malcolm X, Ali)• American Interventionism (Three Kings, Black Hawk Down)Key Features:• Unique: the only book to provide comprehensive analysis of the relationship between film and American history in the post-Cold War era• Topical: ex

'A story of high intrigue and low politics, brutal murder and cunning conspiracies . . . tangy and rambunctious stuff!' Observer 'Gripping and atmospheric' Daily Express'Enjoyably disturbing . . . likely to leave the reader clamouring for more' TLSSt Giles, London, 1829: three people have been brutally murdered and the city simmers with anger and political unrest. Pyke, sometime Bow Street Runner, sometime crook, finds himself accidentally embroiled in the murder investigation but quickly realises that he has stumbled into something more sinister and far-reaching.In his pursuit of the murderer, Pyke ruffles the feathers of some powerful people and, falsely accused of murder himself, he soon faces a death sentence and the gallows. Imprisoned, and with only his uncle and the headstrong, aristocratic daughter of his greatest enemy to help, Pyke must engineer his escape, find the real killer and untangle the web of intrigue that has been spun around him.A story of intrigue, conspiracy and murder set in 19th-century Britain for fans of Antonia Hodgson, Ripper Street and Patrick Easter.'The novel drips with all the atmospheric details of a pre-Victorian murder mystery - "pea-soupers", dingy lanterns and laudanum' The Times'Pyke ia an intriguingly unfathomable character' Financial Times'Pyke is violent, vengeful and conflicted in the best tradition of detectives. His story takes in grisly murder and torture, and uses 1800s London in the same way that hard-boiled fiction uses Los Angeles as a mirror of a corrupt society' Time Out

The Routledge Companion to Crime Fiction is a comprehensive introduction to crime fiction and crime fiction scholarship today. Across forty-five original chapters, specialists in the field offer innovative approaches to the classics of the genre as well as ground-breaking mappings of emerging themes and trends.The volume is divided into three parts. Part I, Approaches, rearticulates the key theoretical questions posed by the crime genre. Part II, Devices, examines the textual characteristics of the genre. Part III, Interfaces, investigates the complex ways in which crime fiction engages with the defining issues of its context – from policing and forensic science through war, migration and narcotics to digital media and the environment. Engagingly written and drawing on examples from around the world, this volume is indispensable to both students and scholars of crime fiction.

In doing so, this collection of essays examines how the relationship between global crime, capitalism, and policing produces new configurations of violence in crime fiction – and asks whether the genre can find ways of analyzing and even opposing such violence as part of its necessarily limited search for justice both within and beyond the state.

The Routledge Companion to Crime Fiction is a comprehensive introduction to crime fiction and crime fiction scholarship today. Across forty-five original chapters, specialists in the field offer innovative approaches to the classics of the genre as well as ground-breaking mappings of emerging themes and trends.The volume is divided into three parts. Part I, Approaches, rearticulates the key theoretical questions posed by the crime genre. Part II, Devices, examines the textual characteristics of the genre. Part III, Interfaces, investigates the complex ways in which crime fiction engages with the defining issues of its context – from policing and forensic science through war, migration and narcotics to digital media and the environment. Engagingly written and drawing on examples from around the world, this volume is indispensable to both students and scholars of crime fiction.

An exploration of representations of female criminality in contemporary French crime fiction, this book offers a literary, sociological and feminist analysis of the stereotypes surrounding women and crime. Surveying how these stereotypes are both invoked and disrupted, it covers Pierre Lemaitre’s Alex, Fred Vargas’s Quand Sort la Recluse (This Poison Will Remain), Leïla Slimani’s Chanson Douce (Lullaby) and Hannelore Cayre’s La Daronne (The Godmother) in their original French and their English translations. Addressing the gap of scholarly interest in legal and cultural representations of female violence in French crime fiction, Ciara Gorman evaluates the subversive ways in which archetypes of female criminality — ranging from the femme fatale to the witch, and from the mère fatale to the ‘bitch’ — are deployed not as reductive shorthands about femininity, but as motors of innovation and resistance. The form and plot of each text is examined for its potential as a polar féministe (feminist crime fiction), a crime novel which incorporates the concerns of feminism — be that the prevalence of sexual and sexist violence in society, or the legacy of misogynist representations of women in the crime genre as a whole. Criminal Women considers the female criminal character as a figure of opportunity, the point at which readers and writers alike may reassess their assumptions about female criminality, and about the feminist potential of crime fiction itself.

Understanding crime fiction in its broadest sense, as a transmedia practice, and offering unique insights into this practice in specific European countries and as a genuinely transcontinental endeavour, this book argues that the distinctiveness of the form can be found in its related historical and political inquiries.